Automating vote tallying on the Google+ "Light Box" community: The TallyBot

The Light Box is a Google+ community that allows people to submit photos for community review. Qualified community members 'vote' on photos by leaving a comment with sequential hashtags like "#delete1", "#delete2", "save5", etc. The when the saves or deletes reach 10, we have a winner (the first to reach the threshold wins.)

It turns out the moderators were using manual methods to determine voting results. Sometimes, there were comments comments that were posted very close in time, and two or more voters would post the same "#delete3" or "#save7" hashtag, and this would make it harder to count.

As an experiment, I created a 'TallyBot' extension to WhoPlussed™ that automates community vote scoring, thus eliminating the need for manual review in most cases.

Interested? Check out the Light Box Voting Pool recent photo submissions on WhoPlussed.